I have a django 1.4.3 application (upgrading to 1.4.14 made no difference) 
that is behaving oddly.  I know 1.4 isn't officially supported, but I'm 
hoping to come up with some understanding about what is going wrong so I 
can get by for the next few weeks until we can start our upgrade to 1.7.  I 
am also concerned that this problem won't simply be fixed by going to 
django 1.7 because I have not been able to find any reference to these 
conditions in my searching.

The application is deployed as a pip installable package into a virtualenv 
in a directory called vproton.  The local_settings.py file is specified by 
environment variable and lives in a directory that is specified by the 
PYTHONPATH environment variable sys.path has everything we expect it to.

I first started investigating based on an odd error coming from a celery 
worker.

=================
  File 
"/home/proton/vproton-15e49fb5/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/sql/compiler.py",
 
line 306, in get_default_columns
    r = '%s.%s' % (qn(alias), qn2(field.column))
  File 
"/home/proton/vproton-15e49fb5/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/models/sql/compiler.py",
 
line 49, in quote_name_unless_alias
    r = self.connection.ops.quote_name(name)
  File 
"/home/proton/vproton-15e49fb5/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/backends/dummy/base.py",
 
line 15, in complain
    raise ImproperlyConfigured("settings.DATABASES is improperly 
configured. "
ImproperlyConfigured: settings.DATABASES is improperly configured. Please 
supply the ENGINE value. Check settings documentation for more details.
=================

It took a while, but I was able to figure out that this error was coming up 
because the 'dummy' backend was being loaded instead of the one that is 
configured in my settings file.

What has been baffling is that we all have verified that our settings file 
appears to be configured correctly and that django is loading it correctly.

=================
$ PROTON_LOG_LOCATION=/home/proton/logs 
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=local_settings PYTHONPATH=/home/proton/config 
vproton/bin/django-admin.py shell
Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(InteractiveConsole)
>>> from django.conf import settings
>>> settings.DATABASES
{'default': {'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2', 'HOST': 
'*******', 'PASSWORD': '*******', 'NAME': 'proton_staging', 'USER': 
'proton'}}
=================

As I dug deeper I wanted to understand how django's database connections 
were handled so I began inspecting django.db 
(https://github.com/django/django/blob/1.4.3/django/db/__init__.py).  I 
determined that the settings object imported from django.conf seems normal, 
but things take a problematic turn once I get to ConnectionHandler which is 
imported from django.db.utils 
(https://github.com/django/django/blob/1.4.3/django/db/utils.py).  

django.db.connections is initialized by calling 
ConnectionHandler(settings.DATABASES) and ConnectionHandler sets 
self.databases equal to the value passed as settings.DATABASES so I expect 
django.db.settings.DATABASES to match django.db.connections.databases, but 
they do not match.

=================
>>> import django.db
>>> django.db.settings.DATABASES
{'default': {'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2', 'HOST': 
'*******', 'PASSWORD': '*******', 'NAME': 'proton_staging', 'USER': 
'proton'}}
>>> django.db.connections.databases
{'default': {'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.dummy', 'TEST_MIRROR': None, 
'NAME': '', 'TEST_CHARSET': None, 'TIME_ZONE': 'America/Chicago', 
'TEST_COLLATION': None, 'PORT': '', 'HOST': '', 'USER': '', 'TEST_NAME': 
None, 'PASSWORD': '', 'OPTIONS': {}}}
=================

I am now left with a question.  Is there any way that django.db can load a 
bad django.conf.settings when the settings module is given by environment 
variable?  As far as I can tell this problem shouldn't even be possible 
since importing django.conf initializes settings as an instance of 
LazySettings that loads .  Has anyone else run into this before?  Is this a 
known issue that would be resolved by just waiting for the 1.7 upgrade we 
have planned?  Is there anything that I should check for in my settings 
file that would cause a problem, but not result in any errors coming back 
to me?

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